


Cuddle Monster Origin Story: Kara (Zor-El) Danvers-Grant     (no hands to touch nor arms to hold her)

by DiNovia



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 07:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20060116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiNovia/pseuds/DiNovia
Summary: For the Christmas in July Supersantafemslash ExchangeFor: SuperBiPrompt: Kara is a cuddle monster, all the time, everywhere they are





	Cuddle Monster Origin Story: Kara (Zor-El) Danvers-Grant     (no hands to touch nor arms to hold her)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunflowerbi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbi/gifts).

Cat Grant became aware of Kara Danvers’ penchant for physical closeness in the usual way if one might consider “the usual way” to be Supergirl’s arm draped around her waist one breezy National City evening on the balcony off Cat’s office. They’d been having one of their post-cataclysmic tête-à-têtes where they would ruminate over life’s little mysteries while carefully avoiding certain truths - such as “I am also your assistant,” and “Platonic is no longer an accurate characterization of my feelings for you.”

Cat considered the unexpected gesture that night to be Kara’s first overture of romantic interest, as a matter of fact. Not to mention, incontrovertible confirmation of her dual personas. Oh, Cat had suspected that Kara and Supergirl were one and the same, but seeing flashes of Supergirl in Kara’s behavior from time to time didn’t necessarily establish an identity so much as suggest one. 

Seeing Kara in _Supergirl’s_ behavior on the other hand…

That was harder to explain away and Supergirl’s hesitance and demure blush immediately following what Cat considered a brazen (and welcome) act was all the evidence the CEO required.

\---

**Exhibit A**

“Is this okay?” Supergirl asked, her voice barely a whisper, and Cat could feel her trembling. A bona fide caped superhero shuddered next to her because of a bit of affectionate closeness. It was mind-boggling.

Cat took a steadying sip of bourbon in the hopes of staving off a revelatory quiver in her voice and husked, “Very much so.”

\---

And that had been the end of it. 

_That_ night. 

Several nights later, Cat contrived an emergency requiring Kara to stay after hours, just to see what would happen. She was not disappointed.

\---

**Exhibit B**

Emboldened by her triumph on the balcony, perhaps, Kara slid closer to Cat on the couch as they pored over the problem layouts together and Cat found the heat of Kara’s thigh against her own to be quite distracting. Not as distracting as the hand lightly resting in the small of her back, to be sure, but diverting nonetheless.

When Kara whispered, “Is _this_ okay?,” Cat didn’t bother to answer. Instead, she sidled closer still and tilted her head, baring her neck for Kara’s inspection, hoping the perfume she’d chosen for the evening might entice the younger woman to bolder pursuits.

Based entirely on the soft, desperate sound Kara made in the back of her throat, Cat declared her plan an unmitigated success.

“Do you like it?” she asked with affected nonchalance. “It’s new.”

Kara slipped her arm around Cat’s waist once again and drew her closer, inhaling deeply. She let her nose graze the sensitive spot just beneath Cat’s ear where the scent was strongest.

“It’s my new favorite,” she declared. Then she went back to work.

\---

Much to Cat’s chagrin, there had been no further discussion - verbal or otherwise - on the matter that night or any after. In fact, owing to a particularly busy week spent battling professional crises and an assortment of villainous otherworldly threats, Cat and Kara barely had a moment alone.

Until one of those threats took it upon himself to rid the world of its Queen of All Media by tossing her off her own building.

\---

**Exhibit C**

The thing that annoyed Cat the most about falling forty stories to her death was the optics of it. CatCo National City was the heart of the empire she had built with blood (not all of it her own), sweat (though she preferred the word _perspiration_), and many tears (mostly other people’s). Being tossed from its summit to her certain death was practically Icarian and the headlines she imagined splashed across her rivals’ newspapers disgusted her.

CATCO WORLDWIDE TOPPLES CAT GRANT

MEDIA QUEEN PLUMMETS FORTY STORIES FROM IVORY TOWER

CEO SWANDIVES TO SIDEWALK IN CATCO PLAZA

Ugh. The humiliation of it all. And with the wind whipping the air from her lungs the way it was, she couldn’t even offer a profanity-laced opinion on her dilemma. There would be no pithy last words for the Queen of All Media.

Then a blurry smudge of red and blue flashed out of the sky and Cat found herself wrapped up in the strongest pair of arms she knew. A heartbeat later, Kara set down on the roof of a converted warehouse in the industrial district but hesitated to let Cat go.

“I’ve got you,” she murmured over and over and Cat, with her face pressed into Kara’s neck, could feel her hero’s panicked pulse pounding through her veins.

“Kara, I’m all right,” she whispered, but when Kara didn’t immediately respond, Cat cupped the younger woman’s cheek in her palm. “Kara, look at me.” 

Slowly, so slowly, Kara turned and Cat watched awareness return to those beautiful sky-blue eyes.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I swear.”

A storm of tears welled in Kara’s eyes, making her lip tremble. Then her eyes darkened with rage.

“You’ll be safe here,” she said, and Cat could see Kara’s jaw muscles tighten as she lifted them both into the air again. She drifted a few feet out from the edge of the roof and dropped down to an open window, entering what appeared to be a loft apartment. Kara carefully set Cat on her feet, though she didn’t release her. Not yet.

She gazed into Cat’s hazel eyes and let her infinitely gentle fingertips drift down Cat’s cheek.

“Wait for me,” she said, and then she kissed Cat, the earnest press of her lips making promises Cat hoped she would keep.

\---

Kara kept those promises and more. And in the glorious afterglow, Cat discovered just how essential physical closeness was to the displaced Kryptonian. Cuddling wasn’t just a pastime to her, no. It was an art form.

\---

**Exhibits D, E, and F**

Cat woke cradled in Kara’s arms and bed many hours after they’d first tumbled into it together, just moments after Kara’s return from vanquishing Cat’s would-be destroyer. Cat was struck by how solid Kara’s body was and how safe she felt in her arms. Utterly so, as if the whole world could crumble around them and never disturb their slumber.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Kara robed in shadows and moonlight, gazing down at her. 

“Darling?” she asked, concern washing over her. What if this had been a mistake?

“I can’t stop staring at you,” Kara whispered, voice touched by awe. She pulled Cat closer. “You are so beautiful.”

\---

Later, while Kara hummed in the kitchen, making avocado toast and perfect soft-boiled eggs in the nude, Cat sleepily refilled her coffee cup from the french press. She wore one of Kara’s white button-downs and nothing else, feeling much younger than her fifty years. She tried to keep the preening smirk from her face but failed, and wasn’t surprised at all when Kara enveloped her from behind in a full-body embrace.

“Breakfast’s ready,” she murmured, nibbling at Cat’s ear. “Would you like it in bed or at the table?”

Cat made a show of considering her options. “Well, having it in bed would be more efficient, I suppose,” she said blithely and Kara rewarded her with a breathy moan and a quick squeeze that was just shy of painful.

“Bed it is, then,” said the younger woman, releasing Cat and reaching for their plates. She was halfway there before Cat could even take a step. “Chop chop,” she added, tossing the cheeky comment over her shoulder. 

\---

Later still, after a decadent weekend in that same bed, Supergirl and Cat stood on Cat’s penthouse balcony under the stars, wrapped up in each others’ arms.

“I don’t want to let you go,” said Kara. She dropped her gaze and a flush of red tinted her freckled cheeks. “Is that selfish of me?”

“This isn’t any easier for me than it is for you, darling,” Cat assured her, reaching up to brush a golden lock of hair out of Kara’s eyes. “You’ll find me greedy and stubborn about these sorts of things.” She shrugged. “If that’s selfishness, well, I guess we’ll both have to get used to it.”

“I’m already used to _this_,” said Kara, indicating their closeness with a sharp nod. “I don’t know how I’ll survive the night without you.”

Her hero’s petulance made Cat smile, though she was warmed by the sentiment, too. “We’ll see each other in a few hours.” She offered that fact as consolation, trying to lessen the sting of their imminent separation.

Kara sighed. “It won’t be the same.”

Cat stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss Kara slowly and thoroughly. “We’ll see about that,” she promised.

\---

After that, Kara could be found with her arms around Cat more often than not. 

For example:

Cat’s executive balcony became Cuddle Monster Central while the two of them were at work and Cat’s favorite of those moments were always accompanied by rain. Somehow, the curtain of raindrops and the slight chill in the air made Kara’s embraces warmer and more solid. Cat wished it rained in National City more often.

Then there was the executive elevator, which Kara now shared with Cat every morning. The slow ascent up forty stories provided ample time for a bit of canoodling, which was especially welcome Mondays as a way for them to transition from couple-time to CatCo-time. Kara knew to the millisecond how long the trip took and _exactly_ when to let go: never too early, never too late.

After their relationship entered the public domain and Kara began to accompany Cat to more and more work-related functions and appearances, the back-seat of the executive town car on the way to and home from these events became an excellent way for them to reconnect, physically and emotionally, especially if they’d both been busy in recent days. 

Likewise, the executive jets. It didn’t take long for Cat to have double-bed Qsuites - purchased from Qatar Airways - installed in each of her three planes. Cuddling with Kara made international flights infinitely better from Cat’s perspective and, she suspected, from the crew’s perspective, too. Kara had only one perspective: Happy Cat, Happy Everything Else.

When they finally moved in together, there was hardly enough space to slip a piece of paper between them most nights, whether they were in the family room watching movies with Carter, in the dining room during game nights, or in the kitchen, throwing together a light dinner. It went without saying that the same applied in their bedroom or on the penthouse balcony, on nights interrupted by Supergirl heroics above all. Cat always waited for Kara’s return, no matter how long it took or how late the hour. Cuddling always took precedence over sleep on those nights.

On their honeymoon in Japan, they never seemed to be more than a step apart from one another. So much so that the ryokan’s attendants would giggle and tease the couple whenever they saw them out and about, calling them Ghidorah, the three-headed monster of Godzilla fame. Kara, not getting the joke, eventually stopped trying to correct them when she realized her protestations only led to additional teasing. Cat just shook her head.

Kara would try her best to maintain a respectable distance from Cat during Carter’s and later, their adopted daughter Allie’s school functions, but she often failed. Math competitions, science fairs, and school plays didn’t necessarily require the comfort of cuddling her wife, but the act was a habit for Kara, and a given as far as everyone else was concerned. Teachers, other parents, even Carter’s and Allie’s peers all weathered the sappiness with various degrees of tolerance. And since neither Carter nor Allie was immune to their mother’s cuddles themselves, they endured no matter how loudly they complained.

It wasn’t only Kara for whom the closeness between them was as essential and as automatic as breathing. Cat sought out Kara’s embrace often, especially when she was experiencing emotional extremes. During spells of anxiety or elation, grief or gratitude, Cat craved the comfort of Kara’s arms. She found their embraces to be a reliable way of centering herself and they served as a great reminder of the whys behind their actions.

Kara’s cuddles were extremely welcome during any illness, major or minor, largely because Kara herself rarely ever got sick. Whether she was tending one of the kids during a bout of strep or slipping into the hospital bed beside Cat after yet another narrowly-averted alien disaster, Kara’s first instinct was to hold the people she loved. 

It had been Alex, unsurprisingly, who’d provided a possible explanation for Kara’s love of cuddling and the comfort she took from physical touch. Early on in Cat and Kara’s relationship, when Cat hadn’t quite understood the intensity of Kara’s needs, she came to Kara’s sister seeking advice.

Alex told her a story. 

It was about a young and happy Kryptonian child with long, blonde hair and pale blue eyes who had made the ultimate sacrifice for her culture and family on the eve of their destruction. The girl’s pod had been knocked off course shortly after launch, however, and instead of fulfilling the solemn promises she had made, she ended up alone and unreachable inside a dead hole in space called the Phantom Zone. For twenty-six years, the girl’s only companion was the computer AI guiding her capsule and though it educated her, read to her, and kept her alive, it had no hands to touch nor arms to hold her. For twenty-six years, the only embrace the Kryptonian child knew was that of her cold, unfeeling ship traveling through the emptiness of space. 

“If weighted blankets had been a thing when she first arrived,” said Alex, “they still wouldn’t have been enough. Dropping a house on her wouldn’t have been enough. It took so long for her body and her systems to adjust to this planet, to the light, to the change in gravity. She used to cry all night, saying she couldn’t feel anything, that nothing seemed real or solid.” Tears glittered in the corner of the agent’s eyes. “Those were hard years.”

All Cat could manage to say at the end of the story was “Thank you.”

She never questioned Kara’s touch again.

\---

_ fin _


End file.
